Creative Commons

The temptation to avoid usability work

November 19th, 2010

I am currently working on a private software project in a startup. I am involved not only in the design of the overall user experience, but also in implementation, since we are not many. The temptation to skip usability work is great for our team of two, and I too have to keep convincing myself why usability work is absolutely crucial to product success. Trying to find a succint enough way to express the basic needs for the work…

Software engineers often question the value of usability work. It may be that a good designer could design a UI that does not create major confusion for most – if those designers already have lots of experience from usability testing in other projects. However, in any application that is done without explicit user research and usability testing targeted for the specific UI, you tend to have dozens of small confusing moments that make up the overall user experience and lead to a general ‘yuk’ reaction. Not to mention that if you don’t intimately know your users’ goals, you are likely to be designing the wrong overall application.

Totally agree!!! I am working on changing the Moodle UI for a better user experience accommodating some of the user interaction strategy that will change the premise of how Moodle works with its end users. The idea is bring out a morphing skeleton which can be personalized to a great extent than the cold Moodle UI with its shortcomings when seen from a designer or an end user perspective. The proposed system will provide a better navigation scheme with lesser scrolling, user customizable layout with a non Moodle look.

Though Moodle 2.0 has considerable scope for writing better layouts I still feel there is a long long way to go achieving the standards that is more intuitive and user friendly.

In Moodle, a great challenge can also be coordinating the work with the community so that when you create something valuable for usability, they can test it and possibly also embrace it. What is your audience for this work? How do you plan to get data from end users?

I am all for helping Moodle getting there in terms of usability, of course :).

:) Absolutely!! Whatever we come up with we plan to share with the moodle community.. And of-course usability factors can only be well logged and evolve when captured with a real audience… in my country i have been part of initiatives online and offline where capturing such data won’t be a show stopper… we have a network of moodle sites. In one of our bigger sites the audience is around 70k.. i think that should serve as a good testbed :) Once that is done i will open it to the Moodle community.

We are planning to target user-centered(student centered) design as opposed to teacher/admin centered design. I feel that will open new gates on how we look forward to structure learning process in Moodle